The Bank of England (BoE) more than doubled its external legal spend in 2013-14 to £5m, the first increase since 2008-09 and the peak of the banking fallout from the financial crisis.

Accounts filed today (17 June) for the year ending 28 February show external legal fees were up from £2m to £5m, set against an increase in combined profit before tax by 69% to £180m.

In March, the BoE confirmed it had appointed One Essex Court's Lord Grabiner QC and Travers Smith to carry out a review into its conduct in the foreign exchange market, in response to allegations that it allowed the manipulation of foreign exchange (forex) rates to take place.

Given the timing of the announcement, and the BoE's March-February financial reporting year, it is unclear whether the forex investigation would have contributed to the uplift in cost. A BoE spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.

However, the spokesperson did confirm that some of the increase is attributable to the Bank's new responsibility for the Prudential Regulation Authority, including advice on financial institutions' capital and liquidity requirements. The BoE did not comment on which firms had been most frequently used in the period.

The costs are down from a peak in 2008-9, when fees topped £8m. Accounts for 2007-8 also show the BoE spent £2m on legal fees, and incurred a further £9.1m of total costs – much of it spent on external legal counsel – relating to assistance provided to Northern Rock.

Last year, a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request by Legal Week showed Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer billed the BoE more than £14m in legal fees between March 2008 and December 2012, the vast majority of which was charged in the first two years of that period.

High-profile roles for Freshfields in the months following the collapse of Lehman Brothers included advising on BoE's £50bn liquidity support programme for the commercial banking market in early 2008, as well as the multi-billion-pound bailout of some of the UK's biggest financial institutions in the weeks following Lehman's fall.

In 2009, Freshfields' relationship with the BoE was cemented further by the appointment of former partner Graham Nicholson as the bank's chief legal adviser.

BoE's second-highest biller during the period covered by the FOI was Clifford Chance (CC), with total fees of £1.4m, while Bird & Bird ranked third with £647,000. Other notable beneficiaries of the bank's legal spend over the near five-year period include Kirkland & Ellis (£378,000) and Travers Smith (£287,500).

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